New White Paper: Making Your CRM Aspiration a Reality
Heller Consulting has just released a new white paper entitled Making Your CRM Aspiration a Reality available for free download on TeamHeller.com. This paper is a follow up to their popular Insights into CRM for Nonprofits from 2012. For this paper, the authors built on the knowledge and concepts from the original, and include more details about the steps necessary to bring CRM into an organization successfully.
Read MoreUpdate: Quick Review of Luminate CRM
Heller Consulting recently updated their report on the top 5 donor management applications for Salesforce with updates focusing on Blackbaud’s Luminate CRM.
Luminate CRM was spun off in 2010-2011 as a separate product and descendant of the original Common Ground product offered by Convio, which was acquired by Blackbaud in mid-2012. Blackbaud has focused its Luminate CRM development efforts on strengthening the integration with Luminate Online while has also designing Luminate Analytics to be a powerful segmentation and reporting tool for the Luminate suite. This is a large App that interacts heavily with many Salesforce.com standard objects, meaning that Luminate CRM customers, and all Salesforce customers in general, should carefully design and test additional non-fundraising uses of Salesforce.com.
Read MoreSalesforce: Ask the Experts
If you could ask a magical Salesforce Expert genie a few questions about apps, tools, or techniques, what would you ask? Would you ask what are the best apps for email marketing? What are the best techniques for segmenting a database? How do I train new users on Salesforce? Maybe even what’s the best way for my organization to get started? Is the Nonprofit Starter Pack the best choice for me?
These are all great questions that a lot of consultants will charge you a lot of money to answer.
Read MoreSalesforce Spring ’14 Release Notes
There have been lots of Salesforce Spring ’14 Release Notes posts out there in blog land, but I wanted to give my perspective on what I thought were the features which would have the most impact for nonprofit organizations. Of course, at 330 pages, I am bound to miss one of your favorite features, but these are the ones which jumped out at me during my review. Some are big, some are small, but I think all are great improvements to the platform. For a full review of what’s coming in the Spring ’14 release, be sure to check out the live event on February 12th, hosted by Salesforce.com.
Spring ’14 Release Note Features I’m Looking Forward To Using:
Read MoreWhy Investing in CRM Will Mean the World to Your Supporters
Years ago, I worked with a client who was trying hard to use segmenting and conditional content to create a more relevant experience for their constituents via email. We looked at the data, we found the people who took action on a particular issue, and then we grouped them together so that we could better tailor their communications to that issue. It helped. We saw some lifts in core email marketing metrics. But we were always left with a few nagging problems: What happens when the organization needs to send out information unrelated to that action and what if they did something different between the last time we sent them something and the next time we were about to send them something?
Read More